Report on NE ConlangCon

Hello, all!  Well, we finally managed to get several conlangers from New
York City and upstate New York together at the same time in the same place
(specifically, yesterday afternoon at my house in Albany).  Present were
Sally Caves, John Cowan, Diana Slattery, Daniel O'Neil, Eli (aka Ishmael,
whose last name I still don't know), and myself.  Several other people had
expressed an interest but ended up not being able to make it for various
mundane reasons, but we hope to see them next time (and one outcome of this
was a general consensus that there will be a next time -- that in fact we
should try to do this type of thing on some kind of ongoing basis).

What happened was that we basically just sat around all afternoon talking
-- not only about conlanging and linguistics, but also going off on many
strange and wonderful tangents: high-context vs. low-context cultures; the
culture, mythology and laws of the Proto-Indo-Europeans; various
science-fiction and fantasy writers and their works; role-playing games;
and many more which, alas, I've already forgotten.  John autographed
several copies of _The Complete Lojban Language_, and Sally handed out
copies of "Caedmon's Song" in Teonaht, Modern English, and the original Old
English.  Eventually we went out to dinner at Ichiban, a local Japanese
restaurant, along with my wife, Billie Aul, and John's wife Gale and
daughter Irene.

Everyone agreed that the event was a great success and that we should do it
again.  There was talk of starting a _salon_.

I gather that similar gatherings have been happening in other parts of the
world, and I hope that eventually these may coalesce into larger gatherings
-- perhaps even the World ConlangCon that some people have proposed for the
tenth anniversary of this list, which I gather is sometime in the summer of
2001.

- Tim

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Tim Smith

"To live outside the law you must be honest."
        -- Bob Dylan